The risk is mindless ritualism, but I can’t help but wonder if the benefits are so much more that the risk worth taking. T’is the season for many blog posts on Lent, but my experience last weekend demands I say something on the topic.
Invited to St. George’s Anglican Church in Colorado Springs to teach women core Christian worldview content to launch their season of Lent with a renewed focus on the life of the mind, I came home with a longing for Lent and liturgy. As I prepared for the conference, I focused on ways to communicate that Lent is about orienting the whole life toward sacrificial living, not simply a small sacrifice for a short season to launch diets or meet personal challenges. This I had always known, but as a generic-sort of Baptist, Lent is not a part of our calendar and, frankly, fairly easy to ignore. Prior to the conference, my new Anglican friends were reminding themselves that Lent is not just a time to remove something from their daily routine, but an opportunity for greater sacrifice by replacing one or more things with other things that will nourish them in the immediate and longterm. We all seemed to be on the same page…but in different books?
The richness of Lent and the Anglican liturgy was unmistakably rich, offering an opportunity for a deliberate reverence that was impossible to not be fully engaged in. I’m inspired to a new way of embracing my faith as I return to my life this week and to church on Sunday…with another perspective on worship and sacrifice.
March 16th, 2011 | 11:05 am | #1
On Ash Wednesday, I began by addressing the issue of repetition in prayer. We want to avoid what Jesus called “vein repetitions”, yet not all repetition is vein, such as “and His mercy endures forever”.
This is how I went about it. If we think of prayer as a mere exchange of information, then repetition is unnecessary, after all, God is not hard of hearing. However, if we think of prayer as an exercise, or like the act of cleaning a dirty plate, then repletion makes perfect sense. As a plate isn’t cleansed in one wipe of the dish cloth, and as a muscle isn’t bulging in one pump of the dumbbell, so our souls require, at times, an intense repletion to fully impress our pray, not on God, but upon ourselves.
March 16th, 2011 | 1:22 pm | #2
This is very good; I think many tend to underestimate the power a rich liturgy draws from the God who made our bodies to be responsive to beauty and form.
Matt Milliner describes the liturgy of Coptic Christians this way in the wake of bombings:
Would that all Christian worship so form believers to glory in Jesus even in the face of violence, rather than merely entertain us with interesting and fun talks.
March 18th, 2011 | 8:10 pm | #3
So glad for Sarah’s posting regarding St. George’s Anglican visit – I really enjoyed studying and the discussions we all had.
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